The Circumference of a Squirrel

The Circumference of a Squirrel: Carry That Weight

Zachary Scott Theatre Center,

through May 6

Running Time: 1 hr, 30 min

Every son's journey with his father is the same: In the beginning, the son is carried by the father. In time, he is able to stand on his own, and the two walk side by side. Then, eventually, time takes its toll, and the son must carry the father. That is the way it has always been and the way it will be as long as there are fathers and sons. So, the story of one son's journey will always be the story of every son's journey, one that can't hold any surprises for us because we know it already.

And yet, every son's journey with his father is different. Each son is carried differently by his father and comes to walk beside him in an individual manner. And when the time comes, each finds his own distinctive way to take his father into his arms. So while we may know full well where it will end, the story of a son's journey with his father can still catch us unawares and captivate and move us when it captures the singular way in which its subject comes into his own and finds his stride and, in his father's latter days, chooses to carry that weight.

So it is with The Circumference of a Squirrel, playwright John Walch's story of a son struggling with the burden of his father. Almost from the moment Walch's protagonist Chester starts describing his complicated relationship with his father, we can see where the story is headed -- it is a tale of rebellion and acceptance that belongs to every family and every generation. Yet Walch so skillfully personalizes the story, fleshes it out with detail that is both uncommon and illuminating, that it is nevertheless fresh and absorbing. He gives us Sisyphus in a squirrel, vainly attempting again and again and again to cart a cinnamon-raisin bagel up the trunk of a tree; a squirrel bite that forces his father to undergo a painful series of rabies shots and inspires a kind of squirrel genocide in their home; the glazed delights of a doughnut shop; a basement packed with holiday wreaths of every material available in an arts & crafts shop; a deathwatch hospital stay marked by bedside games of Battleship and Risk and Monopoly and episodes of Wheel of the Fortunate. And as we walk with Chester on his particular journey, we find it not only has the power to entrance us but the power to move us as well.

Of course, Walch also has the benefit of a very gifted actor telling Chester's story in this Zachary Scott Theatre Center world premiere production. Martin Burke is a performer whose charms and expressiveness of feeling run deep, and he draws on both to chart Chester's complex internal odyssey. The comic verve that he employs so effectively in the now-annual presentations of The Santaland Diaries are here and used to good effect, but so are the intensity and earnestness that marked his acclaimed performances in Angels in America. He communicates the pain in Chester's heart and spirit so personally that it bleeds into your own chest. One can easily imagine other actors playing the part and playing it well, but it's hard to imagine any other actor fusing himself with the role the way Burke does here. It's a measure not only of Burke's artistry but of director Shoshan Gold's. She has tuned his performance with perfect pitch; there's not a false note in it.

Walch seeds Chester's narrative with circles: that bagel, the game-show wheel, inner tubes, silver dollars, doughnuts, the pupils in a person's eyes, a spherical bed in a honeymoon suite, washers, wreaths, a hospital window, a wedding ring, and most frequently and significantly, those preserver-like mints, Life Savers. They reinforce the sense of the cycles being played out here: the circles in life that take us from a beginning to an end in which there lies another beginning, the ones that show a father rearing a son who eventually becomes another father. So as we feel the emotion in Chester's individual story, his circle overlaps with ours and we are connected, with him and with each other, and for at least a moment are able to know the grace in shouldering a father's weight and accepting it ourselves.